Some headway being made against severe food allergies

Some drugs promising

Posted: Friday, January 21, 2005

By Alicia ChangAssociated Press

Sheila Smith always suspected her 6-year-old daughter was allergic to peanuts. Rebecca would suddenly break out in hives whenever she ate peanut butter and jelly. Once, she had a bad reaction by merely touching the crumbs of a peanut butter sandwich.

The Smiths had no choice but to change their lifestyle. Whenever the family dined out, Smith would talk to the chefs ahead of time. Relatives and friends were warned, and all things peanut were banned from the Smith home.

"We have a peanut-free house," said Smith, a 42-year-old homemaker from Schenectady, N.Y. "Even my husband and I don't eat peanuts just in case it gets on our skin and we pass it on."

About 11 million Americans suffer from food allergies and about 200 die every year from food allergy-related reactions.

There is no cure yet, but there are some promising research efforts toward lessening allergic reactions or even finding a cure. One new study is testing an asthma drug.

"From where we sit today, it looks a whole lot brighter than it did five or 10 years ago in trying to find a way to protect allergic individuals," said Anne Munoz-Furlong, who founded the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, a Fairfax, Va.-based nonprofit patient advocacy group.

An allergic reaction occurs when the body's immune system, in charge of fighting infection and disease, mistakes the food as harmful and launches an attack against it.

For the past few years, allergists and advocates were pinning their hopes on a promising experimental drug to treat peanut allergy only to see their hopes dashed.

In a 2003 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, allergy sufferers who took the drug TNX-901 were able to eat more peanuts without reacting. While not a cure, researchers saw the drug as a way to avoid dangerous complications from peanut exposure.

But the study was abruptly halted last summer because of corporate squabbling among three biotechnology companies - Genentech Inc., Novartis AG and Tanox Inc. - over potential profits.

After that study was scrapped, the companies regrouped and tested a federally approved asthma drug on peanut allergy sufferers instead. The goal is to see whether Xolair, a drug for people with serious allergic asthma, will work for people with peanut allergy.

Last June, researchers started enrolling patients in clinical trials at 20 sites, mostly in the United States. Although advocates were initially devastated by the demise of the TNX-901 study, they are encouraged by the new study since both drugs are similar in controlling a molecule that causes sufferers' severe reactions.